Todd Klein: A Man of Letters

All of us here at iFanboy appreciate the underdogs of comics, the forgotten soldiers, the unspoken heroes of comics: Letterers. Forget Miller, Moore, and Gaiman. Instead, we should appreciate Starkings, Eliopoulos, and Klein!

Thus, it interested me today to find that lettering legend, Todd Klein has started his own website, which included, among other things, a How To section. If you’re not familiar with Todd Klein, go check the credits of some of the best DC and Vertigo books you’ve read in the last 30 years, and you’ll find his name on most of them, from Watchmen and Sandman to Fables today.

I have to say, the letters on the web site could stand to be a bit higher resolution. But it looks like he’s already addressing that problem.

If you’ve ever tried to make your own comics, you’ll find that figuring out how to letter is not nearly as easy as it seems. You’ve got to navigate odd programs like Adobe Illustrator, and learn a whole thing. And then, in that process, you realize it’s not nearly as easy as you supposed it to be.

There are lots of tutorials out there, but everyone seems to do it differently, and there are no clear answers. It turns out that it’s really trial and error. So having tips from a guy like Klein is incredibly valuable.

Plus, like all good citizens, he’s rollin’ with the blog.

Comments

  1. Neat! It brings me back to my drafting classes in h.s. My gramps was a draftsman and you could find little hand-lettered notes and labels all around the house. Kind of like living in a comic book.

  2. Wow, I would be all over Todd Klein’s “How To” section if I currently had a computer that hadn’t been screwed up by the shop that was supposed to repair it. Thanks for the link, this will be one of the first things I’ll be checking out when the shop (for a second time) returns my computer, if they can manage to repair it the second time around… something to look forward to…

    Until then, all I can do in the analog void is practice my penmanship with good old pencil, pen and tracing paper over graph paper…